1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a system and method for assessing and analyzing the risks of adverse effects resulting from the use of a particular drug, either alone or in combination with other drugs, nutrients, supplements, and other substances.
2. Description of the Related Art
In September 1997, information regarding cardiopulmonary disease related to the use of fenfluramine and phentermine (“fenphen”) prompted the United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to request the manufacturers of these drugs to voluntarily withdraw both treatments for obesity from the market. Subsequent studies show a 25 percent incidence of heart valve disease apparently resulting from diet drug use. Thus, up to 1,250,000 people may have sustained heart valve damage from these diet drugs and the FDA indicates that this may be the largest adverse drug effect the agency has ever dealt with.
Current estimates are that some 2.2 million hospital patients had serious adverse drug reactions and more than 100,000 people die each year from adverse reactions to prescription drugs. Accordingly, federal officials have recommended that the FDA require hospitals to report all serious drug reactions to the agency. The Inspector General of the Department of Health and Human Services has also indicated that the FDA should also work to identify harmful effects of new drugs and encourage health-care providers to rapidly call the FDA with information about drug side effects. As new drugs are introduced at increasing rates, the FDA will likely need additional resources to protect the public from hazardous drug side effects.
If one or two adverse drug reactions slip through the FDA's reporting process, the results can be tragic for some patients. That is especially true when the adverse reactions are rare but serious—such as in the case of liver failure caused by medication. All drugs have the potential to harm or kill the people they are designed to help. An injection of penicillin can kill in minutes if the recipient is allergic to this life-saving drug. Even common aspirin can be deadly.
Clinical trials of a new drug often involve a few hundred patients and therefore may not reveal that a drug can cause serious injury or death in one patient in 10,000 or even 1,000 patients. Accordingly, it is critical for researchers and drug companies to be able to analyze and predict adverse reactions among patients in their studies.
In addition, in clinical trials for drugs used to treat diseases such as diabetes, which affects so many people and is difficult to treat, FDA officials often face tremendous pressure to accelerate their approval process. Often, in this “fast-track” process, cases of adverse drug effects may slip through reporting procedures.
An even bigger challenge to the FDA is the occurrence of adverse drug reactions after the drug is on the market. In this case the drug is prescribed to a much larger population of patients, many of whom are taking other substances such as extracts, nutrients, vitamins, hormones or drugs that might have an adverse effect with the prescribed drug.
Thus, there is a need for effective analysis of adverse drug effects.
Unfortunately, such a system has not been available.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,758,095 to Albaum et al., “Interactive Medication Ordering System,” discloses a system and method for ordering and prescribing drugs for a patient. This system includes an improved process for facilitating and automating the process of drug order entry. The user may interact with the system in a variety of ways such as keyboard, mouse, pen-base entry or voice entry. The system includes a database containing medical prescribing and drug information which is both general and patient-specific. The system also permits the user to view current and previously prescribed medications for any patient. The system can alert the user to potentially adverse situations as a result of the prescribed medication based on information in the database.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,299,121 to Brill et al., “Non-Prescription Drug Medication Screening System,” discloses a system for use in pharmacies which uses customer inputs to assist the customer with the selection of an appropriate non-prescription medication to relieve symptoms of an illness, injury or the like. The system uses an expert system to perform the selection. The system utilizes a personal computer with a keyboard, monitor and disk drive as input/output devices with appropriate programming for prompting a user to input information which is used by a knowledgebase to determine non-prescription medications which may be purchased by the customer to relieve symptoms of injuries and illnesses included in the knowledgebase.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,594,637 to Eisenberg et al., “System And Method For Assessing Medical Risk,” discloses a system and method for assessing the medical risk of a given outcome for a patient comprising obtaining test data from a given patient corresponding to at least one test marker for predicting the medical risk of a given outcome and obtaining at least one variable relating to the given patient and transforming the test data with the variable to produce transformed data for each test markers. A database of transformed data from previously assessed patients is provided, and mean and standard deviation values are determined from the database in accordance with the actual occurrence of the given outcome for previously assessed patients. The transformed data is compared with the mean and standard deviation values to assess the likelihood of the given outcome for the given patient and the database is updated with the actual occurrence for the given patient, whereby the determined mean and standard deviation will be adjusted.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,067,524 to Byerly et al., “Method And System For Automatically Generating Advisory Information For Pharmacy Patients Along With Normally Transmitted Data,” discloses a method and system for generating advisory messages to pharmacy patients, including appending patient-specific information to a data record containing normally transmitted information. The data record is transmitted between a third party computer and a pharmacy computer during a pharmacy transaction. The data record transmitted to the pharmacy computer is captured by an advisory computer as the data record is received by the pharmacy computer or after the data record is transmitted to the pharmacy computer, and the patient-specific information is extracted from the captured data record. The advisory computer generates an advisory message based on the extracted patient-specific information, and it transmits the generated advisory message to a pharmacy printer.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,000,828 to Leet, “Method Of Improving Drug Treatment,” discloses a computer implemented method and system for improving drug treatment of patients in local communities by providing drug treatment protocols for particular disease states, such as Diagnosis Related Group (DRG) classifications. The protocol contains ranked recommendations for drug treatments of the disease state, and the computer system collects information about the risks and benefits of the drug treatments. The information collected about the treatments is used to modify the rankings of the drug treatments in the protocol.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,219,674 to Classen, “System for creating and managing proprietary product data” discloses systems and methods for creating and using product data to enhance the safety of a medical or non-medical product. The systems receive vast amounts of data regarding adverse events associated with a particular product and analyze the data in light of already known adverse events associated with the product. The system develops at least one proprietary database of newly discovered adverse event information and new uses for the product and may catalog adverse event information for a large number of population subgroups. The system may also be programmed to incorporate the information into intellectual property and contract documents. Manufacturers can include the information in consumer product information that they provide to consumers or, in the case of certain medical products, prescribers of the medical products.
However, none of these references provides a system and method for analyzing the risks of adverse effects resulting from the use of a particular drug, either alone or in combination with other substances including but not limited to hormones, drugs, nutrients, and supplements.
Thus, there remains a need for a more efficient and effective system and method for analyzing the risks of adverse effects resulting from the use of a particular drug, either alone or in combination with other substances including bit not limited to hormones, drugs, nutrients, and supplements. There also remains a need for a more efficient and effective system and method for analyzing the risks of adverse effects resulting from the use of a particular drug on particular segments of the population.